THE COMING DEMISE OF RUSSIAN AUTOCRACY AND PATRIARCHY?
See MSN's very recent article "Kirill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church who considers Putin to be a 'miracle'" with a fascinating slide show depicting him as a strong supporter of Putin and the Russian military, lending all the splendor and regal robes of his patriarchal position to the support of Putin's war in Ukraine.
As I write this, Ukrainian armed forces are pushing Russian forces out of Kharkiv in the east as well as advancing toward Kherson in the south, as despirited Russian soldiers have lost both the will and the supplies with which to fight. If Ukraine were to retake Kherson, it would threaten to cut off Russia's "land bridge" to Crimea. Ukraine's new missiles are already destroying military bases and command centers in Crimea. If and when Ukraine drives the Russian forces completely out of Ukraine, what will become of Kirill's prestige and power, not to mention Putin's? Already, some "Russian Officials Propose Overthrowing Putin, Charging Him With Treason" per Newsweek magazine.
While we were living in Moscow and I was leading the project to revise the Russian Bible in the early 2000s, one of our Russian coworkers was a young man who worked in then-Metropolitan Kirill's office of the Russian Orthodox Church's external relations department. He was working with us ostensibly because Kirill's office couldn't afford to pay him a regular salary. At about the same time, I had been invited as a representative of an American publishing ministry to a meeting with Russian Orthodox bishops... who, as these bishops drove up each in their black Mercedes sedan, said that the other Western guests were given a special half-price rate for rooms at the Russian Patriarch's hotel: "only" $200 per night, not $400: what a bargain! But they didn't have enough money to pay my Russian coworker. (At the time, foreigners could find a decent hotel room in Moscow for under $50 a night including breakfast, and we were renting a Russian apartment for about $200 a month.)
This young man told me one time that he reported about me to the Russian FSB (the successor to the Soviet's KGB), saying that I was no threat to Russia. He also claimed that I of course reported to U.S. intelligence agencies, which I denied, saying that it was illegal for American religious workers to also work for or report to U.S. intelligence agencies. So I am personally aware of the fact that Kirill's office cooperates with the Russian intelligence services.
How and why could it ever happen that such a "Devil's bargain" could occur between church and state in Russia? Kievan Rus adopted Orthodox Christianity in 988 A.D. (My wife and I drove to Chicago in 1988 to celebrate the "Millenium of Russian Christianity" at a Ukrainian Orthodox cathedral there: now the Ukrainian Orthodox in the U.S. and Canada are strongly opposed to Russia.) To understand this issue, let me explain a bit of history: in the 10th through 15th centuries, Kyiv was the center of Orthodox Christianity, eventually having the largest number of Orthodox followers anywhere.
But by the end of the 16th century, as the article "HOW THE RUSSIAN CHURCH BECAME PATRIARCHAL" explains on page 2, "Then, in January, 1589 Patriarch Jeremiah and Tsar Theodore Ivanovich presided over a 'Holy Synod of the Great Russian Empire and of the Greek Empire' which sanctioned the creation of an autocephalous Russian patriarchate."
To clarify this rather lengthy obfuscation, I woud add a clarification: "In actual fact, Patriarch Jeremiah was imprisoned by the Ottomans and the Muscovites, and was forced to elevate the see of Moscow to a patriarchy [Studylight.org]." Feel free to research this on your own: Fr. Thomas Hopko, in one of his Ancient Faith Radio podcasts, years ago tipped me off about this by saying that the Russians had virtually kidnapped the Ecumenical Patriarch and were holding him hostage until he agreed to make Moscow a Patriarchate and the center of Slavic Orthodoxy. So there you have it: the Moscow church supplanted Kyiv's and has been in bed with the semi-pagan state for over 500 years, since the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.
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